Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, former talk show host, really wants vouchers for the millions of students in Texas. Fortunately, he has been defeated year after year by a coalition of rural Tepublicans and urban Democrats.
The battle is on again this year. Patrick and his fellow ideological zealots are headed for a showdown on the issue. There is no evidence that vouchers “work,” and much evidence that they don’t. In a state like Texas, the voucher proposal is strongly opposed by a brave group called Pastors for Texas Children. (Make a donation if you can to help them.)
Supporters of vouchers insist that the schools that receive public funds should be exempt from state tests or any other accountability measures, which might limit their “freedom.”
“A bipartisan group of state representatives hammered private school choice proponents at a heated legislative hearing on Monday, signaling an enduring uphill battle in the Texas House for proposals that would use taxpayer dollars to help parents send their kids to private or parochial schools, or educate them at home.
“Rural Republicans and Democrats in the lower chamber have long blocked such programs — often referred to in sweeping terms as “private school vouchers,” although there are variations. Passing one has emerged as a top priority in the Texas Senate for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who unsuccessfully pushed a private school choice program when he was a Republican state senator from Houston and chairman of the Senate Education Committee.”
Of course, the proposal for vouchers is a pathetic excuse for failing to restore the $5 billion cut to the public schools in 2011.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Here’s hoping vouchers continue to lose. Some private schools, like some exclusive magnet schools, want to be able to pick and choose among students. Unfortunately the exclusive magnet schools get away with this and still get public funding.
I think vouchers are a bad idea for many reasons. One of them is that they would provide public funding to schools that are allowed to use any kind of measure they want to select students. These are NOT schools open to all, any more that exclusive magnet or exclusive suburban schools are.
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Again with the magnet school fear mongering. Are magnet schools a big problem in the US? Are billionaires promoting, propagandizing for and funding some big gigantic magnet school movement as they are for charter schools? No outside group is forcing magnet schools on school districts, the state DOEs are not forcing magnet schools on school districts. But here in NJ, the state DOE is forcing charter schools on school districts unless the residents band together and make a huge stink against the charter school. Most districts don’t even have magnet schools. The individual districts decide whether they want a magnet school or not and the magnet school is under the jurisdiction of the duly elected school board. Thus, parents have an opportunity to object to the magnet school and voice their concerns at board meetings. By all means, let’s have a discussion about a very minor pseudo “problem.”
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“Again with the magnet school fear mongering.”
Not fear mongering. I agree with Joe N about the problem of public “magnet” schools that are discriminatory by definition in their admissions process.
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Duane: At least magnet schools don’t pretend to be open to all as charter schools do. I am NOT defending magnet schools one damn way or the other. Just pointing out that there is no massive magnet school problem in the US. There is a problem with charter school and school voucher proliferation because they are backed by a multitude of billionaires, their lackey politicians and much of the media. Where’s the advocacy for magnet schools? Mouse, meet blue whale. As far as I know, Joe Nathan is a big charter school apologist and he is always using the magnet school red herring to blow holes in the anti-charter or charter skeptical group. I am fed up with JN’s red herring argument.
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One of the reasons we have charter laws in more than 40 states is that a number of low income and people of color were very frustrated by some magnet school admissions policies. I understand you (Joe) don’t see magnet schools as a problem in your area, or in most of the US.
The fact that some charter opponents are fine with district schools using admission tests is one reason that some people question how serious some charter opponents are about their assertions that “public schools are open to all.”
Even entire districts are not “open to all.”
Also, for probably the 50th time on this blog, I’ll point out that our Center, and I are strong supporters of strong public schools, district and charter. I’ve written a weekly newspaper out column for several decades that points to some excellent as well as troubling aspects of some district and some charter public schools.
This week’s column praises a number of districts for their policies on weighting of grades for dual credit courses. The newspaper column also mentions a meeting we’re co-sponsoring with a number of school districts and organizations representing districts, as well as community organizations and chartered public schools.
Here’s a link to that column:
http://hometownsource.com/2016/10/19/dual-credit-frustrations-opportunities-focus-of-nov-5-meeting/
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The reason that so many states adopted charter school laws was because Arne Duncan made it a condition of Race to the Top. Any state that hoped to be eligible for a share of $5 billion in federal money had to agree in advance to adopt a law authorizing charters. Have we seen a surge in academic performance since the adoption of charters in so many states? No. In many states–see Ohio and Nevada, for example–charters dominate the low-performing lists.
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Most charter laws were adopted before Race to the Top began. Some charter laws were modified in response to RTTT. Some were not.
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Here’s the big new idea among ed reformers in Ohio:
“Governor Kasich wants Ohio students to get some work experience while still in high school. Speaking at a conference in Cleveland Tuesday Kasich questioned whether schools are training kids for 21st century jobs.
“The fact is the system is broken. It’s a broken system. So one of the things we’re going to try to do is put in the Cristo Rey model, the Catholic model for poor. You go to school for three weeks and the fourth week you go out and work. We’re going to try to do it… Probably won’t get it done but we’re going to try.”
Kasich’s children, of course, won’t be working a week a month for tuition. They attend a pricey private school. This “work one week a month rather than go to school” model is reserved for the children of the lower and middle classes.
Does anyone in ed reform ever work on public schools?
They’re all on the public payroll. Maybe we should hire some people who actually value public education to run it? Why are we paying public employees to promote private schools?
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The first calls for “reform” in the guise of vouchers arose immediately after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that separate but equal was inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then (and now) as merely giving parents free “choice.”
But the 1950’s voucher reform faded away when it became clear that because of school attendance boundaries no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end the ongoing de facto segregation, the reform movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since then trying new tactics to restore racial segregation because it’s unlikely that the Court’s racial integration order can ever be reversed. When it became clear in the 1980’s that vouchers would never become widespread, the segregationists tried many other routes to restore racial segregation, and the most successful has been charter schools because charter schools can be sold to blithely unaware do-gooder billionaires as well as to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
Reports from the NAACP and ACLU reveal the facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children, and now the NAACP Board of Directors has ratified a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the strengthening of oversight in governance and practice. Moreover, a very detailed nationwide research by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA shows in clear terms that private charter schools suspend extraordinary numbers of black students and students with disabilities.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing.” With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
And now the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools posed a risk to the Department of Education’s own goals. The report says: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of the financial fraud, the skimming of tax money into private pockets that is the reason why hedge funds are the main backers of charter schools.
The Washington State and New York State supreme courts and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions.
Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities and must (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; (2) a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
NO FEDERAL MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC. Hillary Clinton could, if elected President, on day one in office issue an Executive Order to the Department of Education to do just that. Tell her today to do that! Send her the above information to make certain she knows about the Inspector General’s findings and about the abuses being committed by charter schools.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
Lt. Dan thinks he is running everything in Austin. He is very misguided.
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